A calendar block is not a boundary

As a tech lead my time was largely my own. As a manager it was not, and the blocks I put in my calendar to get it back were honoured by nobody.

5 October 2026 · 6 min read · Growing engineers

When I was a tech lead, my time was largely my own. I could decide what a week looked like, sit with a problem for as long as it needed, and finish it. Delivery was the job and the calendar mostly left me alone to get on with it.

That ended when I became responsible for people, and it ended quietly. Nobody takes your calendar away from you. It just fills up.

Requests from stakeholders. Business partners wanting a slot. Time I had to set up for my own teams. And underneath all of it, the work of my actual role, which did not shrink by a single hour to make room for the rest. By Wednesday I would look for the thing I had told myself I was going to do that week and find nowhere left to do it.

This is the same change the promotion itself makes to everything else, arriving in the one place you thought you still had control.

So I did what most people do. I blocked out time.

Why blocking felt like the right answer

It is a reasonable response, and it felt like taking something back. If anyone had asked what my plan for the week was, I could have pointed at the calendar and shown them one.

The blocks did not hold. Not reliably, and not for any stretch worth counting.

People booked over them, and not out of disregard. A block with my own name on it and nothing else reads as a preference. A meeting request has a person on the other end who needs something and is asking for it. When those two meet the preference loses, every time, and it should. My block had nobody on the other side of it except me.

That is what I would tell someone three months into the role. A block in your calendar is not a boundary. It is a note to yourself that other people happen to be able to see. It carries no obligation, because nothing is owed to anyone when you quietly give it up.

It also fails silently, which is worse than failing loudly. When a block gets eaten you do not conclude that the method was wrong. You conclude that you were not disciplined enough. So you try again the following week, slightly more rigidly, and lose again, and now you have a story about your own weakness sitting on top of the original problem.

The time that did hold

What I eventually noticed was that some of my time held perfectly well.

The time with my directs held. One-on-ones happened. When I told someone on my team I would look at something and come back to them on Thursday, I came back to them on Thursday. That time was not protected any harder than the rest. It was not marked more urgently or defended more aggressively. I was not better at it.

The difference was that somebody else knew about it.

There was a person on the other side who had been told, who was expecting it, and who would notice its absence. That is the entire mechanism, and I had it backwards for months. I thought protection was something you applied to time, like a setting. It is not. Time survives contact with other people when other people have a stake in it. Everything else is a preference, and preferences are exactly what a calendar fills up with first.

This is also why the one-on-one does more work than it looks like it does. It is not only where the information is. It is the one hour a week that is structurally hard to lose, because losing it is visible to someone other than me.

The one block that does work

There is one kind of block I have kept, and it took me too long to see why it is different from the ones that failed.

I hold a few slots that amount to office hours. They are not private. I share them with the stakeholders who would otherwise be hunting through my week for a gap, and I commit to being there. People know the time exists and know they can use it.

It holds, for the same reason the one-on-ones hold. Somebody else knows about it, and somebody else would notice if it quietly disappeared. It is not defended any harder than the blocks that failed. It is simply not a secret.

What surprised me is that giving the time away deliberately returned more control than guarding it ever did. A block that only says “busy” invites a request on top of it, because the person asking has nowhere else to put their question and your week is where questions go. A slot that says “here is where this goes” gives them somewhere, and I stopped negotiating every individual request against everything else in the week.

That is the distinction worth keeping. A block you hold privately is a preference. A block you publish and turn up for is a commitment, and only one of those survives other people.

What changed, and what did not

So I stopped trying to defend the week in general and got much more careful about what I committed to and to whom. The commitments I make to my directs come first and I see them through. That is not generosity. It is the only category of time that reliably exists, and most of the job happens inside it.

The other thing that changed was the shape of my own work. I had been waiting for long stretches, the way I used to get them, and they were not coming back. Waiting for a clear morning meant the thing never got done at all.

So I learned to work just in time, in whatever gap was actually there. It is not how I would design it if I had the choice. Some work needs a long uninterrupted run and does not survive being chopped into pieces, and that work is harder now than it was. But most of what sat on my list did not need three hours. It needed twenty minutes and a decision, and I had been saving it for a three-hour window that was never going to arrive.

I want to be clear that none of this solved it. There are no silver bullets here. Some days still end with me putting in extra hours to get through the parts of my own role that nothing else was going to do. Competing priorities still arrive, and sometimes the commitment I made to a direct is the one that has to move, which costs more than moving anything else would have.

What changed was the question. I stopped asking how to get my time back, because it was not coming back. I started asking which time I would be prepared to defend to someone’s face. Not much of my week passes that test. The part that does is the part that holds.